The present invention relates to data mining, and more specifically, to selection of media for presentation to a user.
When propagating information by means of broadcast, a base station includes in a unified information stream, the information that is expected to be propagated to terminals, and a terminal selects a part of information from the information stream. Here, the base station refers to the party that creates and sends broadcast information. Since it is avoided that the base station propagates different contents to different terminals, broadcast-based information propagation has a higher propagation rate over Internet-based information propagation. For example, high definition (HD) films can be propagated via cable television (TV) channels, whereas the rate of internet-based channels is far from supporting HD films.
It is known for a terminal, receiving broadcast information, to have recommendation functionality. A common practice is to arrange a user profile memory in the terminal for storing user profiles and making recommendations according to the profiles. A cable TV channel and a set-top box are an example of a broadcast channel and a terminal receiving broadcast information. A user profile stored in the set-top box might reveal that most of the cable TV programs being played are documentaries. Based thereon the set-top box may consider that the user is quite interested in documentaries, and thus plays to the user information on a new documentary to be played. The information on the new documentary is one example of media data. The set-top box may play to the user video that introduces the new documentary to be played in the interval of a current program the user is watching, e.g. advertisement time. Also the set-top box may display text that introduces the new documentary in a specific area of the screen.
The base station may include in cable TV channels correlated information expected to be played to users, and then broadcast it to all users together with cable TV programs. Further, the set-top box may arrange a correlated information memory for storing correlated information, or advertising media, also referred to herein as media data, which cable TV operators want to play to users. In this way, cable TV channels do not have to always include correlated information. The base station includes latest correlated information in cable TV channels at regular intervals so that the set-top box can update its local correlated information memory. As described above, correlated information may be video or text. Given tag(s) is attached to each piece of correlated information, for representing content the correlated information is used to recommend. According to the user profile and the tags, the set-top box thus can select correlated information played to the user from correlated information contained in cable TV channels or locally stored correlated information.